Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computer systems, and, more particularly, to configurable network socket aggregation to enable segmentation offload.
A maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a communication network is the maximum protocol data unit that can be transferred on the physical medium. The MTU is an inherent property of the physical media associated with the network protocol. For example, the MTU for Ethernet is 1500 bytes. In a network protocol stack, the network layer or Internet protocol (IP) layer may implement datagram fragmentation so that data packets with size larger than the MTU associated with network protocol are fragmented according to the MTU before being delivered to the data link layer and the network adapter. Alternatively, large send or segmentation offload may be implemented by network adapters or network interface cards (NICs) to offload the fragmentation of packets according to the MTU to the network adapter hardware. The network protocol stack can send the packets (without having to perform fragmentation in software) to the network adapter to perform the fragmentation (if necessary) according to the MTU in hardware.